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Eclipse Juno gets first service release

The Eclipse Foundation has quietly made the first service release (SR1) for Eclipse 4.2 Juno available. The publication saw no apparent announcement or release notes from the Eclipse Foundation, although it was planned to ship at the end of September. The SR1 release is designed to fix serious problems with the June release of Eclipse 4.2. The J-Development blog noted that around 80 bugs had been fixed in the release.

But, there are also some new features being reported; for example the JGit/EGit developers have noted that 4.2.1 ships with version 2.1 of their tool and includes the ability to commit using control–enter, and an option to commit and push has been added.

Most notable of Juno's problems though was its reported poor performance. This is unlikely to have been fixed in SR1 as it was already well into development when the problem was highlighted. That said, Eclipse President Mike Milinkovich previously said that SR1 would "address some known performance degradations and memory leaks" and there are reports of some improvements. A new "Platform UI/Juno Performance Identification" page does detail the issues that have been identified and what work has been done so far, and includes a link to a listing of performance-related bug fixes in SR1, those planned for SR2 and work done for future Eclipse releases.

The bug that initiated the discussion about performance is set, according to the bug tracker, to be resolved in Eclipse 4.2.2, 4.2 SR2, due in February 2013. From 3 October, the first test builds of SR2 will begin appearing weekly. The donation of $20,000 by Google for performance testing equipment should ease the development process; according to the performance report, progress is already being made "towards running automated performance tests for the first time at eclipse.org". Meanwhile, Eclipse 4.3, Kepler, recently reached its second milestone release; when released in June 2013, it will incorporate all of the Juno performance fixes.